The Hunter (21 page)
Authors: Theresa Meyers
Dawn crept over the mountaintops, washing the sky in a blush of peach and pink. It had cooled off enough in the night that his breath came in whitish puffs in the air. Their camp at the base of the mountains was still in shadow, but farther out the drops of dew sparkled in the spines of the cactus, and small cactus wrens were twittering and hopping about searching for breakfast.
Beside him Lilly stirred. Damn. Half-asleep, her hair softly tousled, she looked like she’d just gotten out of bed. In other words, sexy as hell. Her silky leg shifted against him as she stretched, and his mind didn’t have to go far to imagine what it would be like to wake with her in a soft bed instead of a couple of blankets on the rock-strewn desert floor. He wanted a lifetime to see that same look on her face every morning.
But that wasn’t going to happen. Not now. Not until he’d found a way to get her away from Rathe so she could become human again. If that was even possible.
Lilly blinked, her eyes feeling gritty, and rubbed one eye with the back of her hand. There was no need for a mirror to tell her she probably looked absolutely awful.
“You ready to wake up and take on the world?” he teased softly. Lilly lightly smacked him in the chest with her palm.
“Do you have to be so impertinently cheerful before there’s even been a proper sunrise?”
He chuckled. “Not a morning person, are you?”
“Hulloooo.” The call came from above them, echoing off the rocks. Beneath her ear, Colt’s heartbeat sped up as he quickly moved to get hold of his gun. Lilly shifted to look up. The old man waved to them from atop the rocky cliff face.
“What’s he doing up there?” Lilly murmured.
Colt didn’t wait to find out. He leveraged her off his chest and began packing up camp before she’d even had time to put her boots back on. “Maybe he just wanted to scout ahead to make sure he knew where he was taking us,” he said.
“In the dark?” Lilly countered. She ran her fingers through her snarled hair, trying to work it out into curls instead of knots.
“Unusual, I admit, but then if we really find it, are you going to fault his methods?” He rudely pulled the blanket off her and began folding it into an impossibly neat and tidy little square, which he stuffed into his saddlebags.
“I suppose you really did mean it was time to get up.”
He gave her a smile. “As much as I’d like to spend all day with you curled up beside me, that’s not going to help us find the Book.”
Lilly had to admit he had a point. She rose and readied herself as best she could, helping with their quick breakfast of beans and bacon, and scouring out the pans with sand before they started their trek up the mountain path. She looked up the vertical and fairly smooth mountainside towering over them, then glanced at Tempus. “Will he—it—be able to climb up there?”
“No. Too steep and too slippery. He’ll fall, and thousands of dollars of Marley’s money will end up in a million useless pieces in the ravine, or worse, he’d fall on one of us. My brothers will mourn my passing, and you’ll never become a real girl. So to answer your question, no. Tempus will stay here to wait for us; you and I will walk.” Colt slipped off Tempus and helped her dismount, then rummaged in the saddlebags. “We’ll take what we need with us and leave the rest,” he said as he pulled out a variety of items that he stuffed into a leather shoulder pack. She recognized the coil illuminator and the sting shooter, but not the other devices. “That should do it.” They left Tempus at the base of the rocks.
The sun was growing impossibly hot as they scrabbled up the loose rock in the trail, winding their way through the larger boulders interspersed with brush until they reached the barren promontory of reddish rock where the guide waited for them. A slit of blue sky could be seen in the center of the spear that slanted up sixty feet high toward the sun, giving it the needle-like appearance.
Colt swiped away the sweat streaming down his face with his sleeve. Lilly doubled over for a breath. It was a good thing she was a demon and not a human, or she never would have made it up that hill in one afternoon. No wonder the old man had come up so early; it had probably taken him all night to get up here, and it certainly would have been cooler. Underneath her corset her shirtwaist and chemise were soaked through. Finally, they caught up to the guide.
Pete’s wizened, leathery face peered at them from beneath the brim of his battered hat. He ambled forward on his thin legs, far more agile than Lilly suspected.
“’Bout time you made it up here. Took ya long enough,” he said, then spat a dark stream of tobacco juice into the dirt, a bit of it dribbling down and staining his white-whiskered chin.
“So where is it?” she asked, between panted breaths.
“Down in that gulch. Cain’t see it from the military road we followed up here from the fort. Have to get up above and look down from the Eye of the Needle,” the old man answered, his voice crackling with disuse.
Colt took off his hat and raked his fingers through his sweat-plastered hair, resting his hands atop his head. His damp shirt clung to him and a heart-stopping smile lit up his whole face. It stole Lilly’s breath away. Even travel-worn and covered in grime, Colt Jackson was a splendid specimen of man. “I’ll be darned, old-timer. You did it. You found the mine,” he said, a distinct note of relief in his voice.
“Oh, I’ve known where it is for years,” the guide answered, chuckling softly to himself.
Lilly watched in horrified fascination as his gap-toothed smile transformed. The skin of his face beginning to sag as if it were wax melting in the heat of the day. Suddenly the old man’s fingernails extended rapidly into black, shining claws, and he reached up and tore at his own sagging skin until it came away in thick fleshy ribbons, exposing grayish scaly skin beneath and leaving a shredded suit of the old man’s body behind on the rocky ground.
Lilly screamed, and it echoed off the rocks. A skinwalker. The worst kind of shape-shifter.
Pointed teeth stretched in needles from his black gums as his eyes went from rhuemy blue to dark yellow, the pupils stretching upward to become vertical slits. This time when it spoke the voice was gravelly and raw, like a longtime cigar smoker in a saloon, making all the hairs on Lilly’s skin prickle and tighten with revulsion. “Now that you know where it is,” the shifter paused, licking its wide jaw with a hideously elongated red tongue that snaked up across his gray cheek, “nobody will ever hear from you again.”
Colt didn’t have time to think. He shoved Lilly behind him with one hand and pulled and cocked a revolver with the other. Lilly’s sudden change in footing didn’t hold. She screamed as she slid in the scree, the loose rock over stone leaving no chance for solid purchase.
“Colt!”
He whipped around just in time to grasp her flailing hand before she went over the edge to the thirty-foot drop below, and he pulled her up behind him. She grabbed hold of the pack strapped to his back. But the momentary loss of concentration cost him.
The skinwalker jolted forward and slashed Colt across the chest with its razor-like claws, shredding both his shirt and his skin. Colt gasped and shouted. He dropped to his knees as unseen fire exploded across his chest, burning and aching. He grunted, aiming his revolver at the fiend. The skinwalker sneered and cackled in delight.
It didn’t know Marley had packed these silver bullets with powdered bone and ash added to the gunpowder. The revolver kicked back as Colt fired. The skinwalker darted like a shadow and the bullet exploded in the sandstone just behind the creature, spraying it with rock shrapnel. It shrieked, the sound reverberating off the rocks and multiplying until it echoed in Colt’s skull, a sound so annoying it made his eyes nearly cross. In a blur the skinwalker moved from one rock to another, changing position so fast Colt could hardly track it, let alone take aim and shoot the damn thing.
“Watch out!” Lilly shouted.
Colt heard her an instant before he was knocked sideways by the creature. The impact sent him flying in one direction and his pack in the other. The shifter extended its wicked claws at Colt’s throat with the aim of ripping it out. He held back the claws, his left arm bulging and burning with the effort, while he pulled the revolver up as close as he could between himself and the creature.
“You missed,” it hissed, spittle spraying Colt’s face.
“Yeah, but at this range my aim is bound to improve.” He fired, and this time the narrowed black slits of the pupils widened with recognition before the creature stiffened and fell in a slump off him.
He lay there for a moment just breathing. God, it was good to breathe.
Lilly crouched beside him, tears streaking the dirt on her cheeks. She cradled his cheek in her palm. “You’re alive!” Her kiss was swift, full of equal parts fear, joy, and passion.
The contact made Colt’s head buzz and everything in him sit up and take notice. She pulled back just as quickly as she had planted the kiss on him.
“That was the idea, wasn’t it?” he teased, then launched into a fit of coughing, which made the cuts on his chest burn even worse.
“Let me look at those.” Lilly gently pulled aside the shredded strips that remained of his cotton shirt and winced. “I have to get those cleaned out before I apply any salve to it. We need to find water.”
He felt like an absolute idiot for not knowing it had been a shifter, but the old man had smelled so bad, he hadn’t noticed the telltale sulfur scent or had the itch in his gun hand. Colt had to admit that perhaps shifters were his weak point. Usually he was pretty adept at picking out supernaturals, but this made twice a shifter had made a fool of him.
He pushed himself up and glanced down the gulch at the dark opening, which was mostly obscured by thorny green mesquite. Where there was greenery out here in the Sono-ran Desert, there was water. “If we want to clean up anything, we need to get down there. You up for going down that gulch?”
Lilly cast a glance at the deep crevasse and her throat moved as she swallowed. “Don’t suppose we have a choice, do we?”
“Not if you want that water and we want to find out what that skinwalker was protecting.”
Lilly lifted herself resolutely from the ground and offered him a hand up. It was a simple gesture. Normally he would have ignored it, thinking it a sign of weakness on his part, but considering the circumstances, he thought he could make an exception. He gazed into her face as he put his hand in hers.
Lilly had been there, resolutely by his side, since he’d started this expedition, and he had to admit that he’d grown accustomed to having her there. She didn’t make him feel weak. In fact, quite the opposite. With a touch, she made him feel alive, and graced with her provocative smile, he thought he might just be able to tear up and throw whole mountains.
“What’s that look for?” Her tone was teasing, but there was a girlish uncertainty in the recesses of her gaze he hadn’t seen before.
“I’m thinkin’ you’re beginning to grow on me.”
She smiled prettily and the uncertainty vanished. “Are you trying to charm me, Mr. Jackson?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“That shifter’s poison must be working faster than I thought,” she mumbled as she shook her head and glanced down over the edge she’d nearly tumbled over.
The gulch wound down, twisting and turning between the larger boulders, a ribbon of green hidden deep in the reddish brown rocks. Far down below at the base of the hill, the tan strip of the military trail snaked into the mountains. The skinwalker had been right about one thing—there would have been no way to see the entrance to the gulch from down there.
“How are we going to get down there?” Lilly murmured. “If we try to walk it, we’ll just slide off and end up speared on a cactus.”
Colt chuckled, then stopped. It burned too badly. He retrieved the pack that had been lost in the scuffle with the skinwalker. “Marley truly does think of everything.” He fished out a length of rope and the mechanical glove fashioned from brass, leather straps, clockwork, and pistons.
“That isn’t going to fire more electric bolts, is it?” Lilly asked, her voice laced with wariness.
“Marley called it a Vertical Mechanical Lift. I thought he was nuts for suggesting I take it. The thing is damn heavy, but it’s made for exactly something like this.”
He flipped the glove-like device over, and Lilly could see the slim channel that ran through the center of the palm lined with rows of small gears. “He said the gears act like little teeth in the rope.” He flipped the contraption over and pointed to a green glass button. “This one makes the gears move upward, and this,” he pointed to the red glass button, “is supposed to make the gears go in reverse.”
“Have you ever tried it before?”
Colt grinned. “Nope. But I watched Marley lower himself from the edge of his roof with it, so I know it at least works, unlike some of his other more harebrained inventions.”
“Like the sting shooter?” she jibed.
“Yeah, that.”
He looped the length of rope around a rock protrusion, making sure to cross it over itself so it wouldn’t slip, then slid the metal glove on. It was fingerless at the tips, jointed at the fingers and wrist to allow for movement, and extended to his elbow. He tightened the leather straps with buckles to adjust it to fit his forearm, wound the small key on the back of his hand, and took hold of the rope, lining it up in the channel of the metal glove. The little gears clicked and engaged, digging into the rope like the shifter’s claws had dug into him.
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